Tijuana homicide spike raising concerns

Homicide unit beefed up to focus on drug-related killings

TIJUANA  Following a two-year drop in homicides, a spike in recent months has been drawing concern of business and government leaders — and demands for the military to return to a more visible role in patrolling the region.

Baja California law enforcement authorities are linking much of the violence in Tijuana, about 80 percent of the incidents, to rivalries among neighborhood drug peddlers, with many of the killings taking place in the vast eastern working-class neighborhoods.

As of Friday, the Attorney General’s Office had reported 192 homicides so far this year in Tijuana — out of more than to 260 statewide — with 61 of the killings taking place this month. That represents a 47 percent increase over the first four months of 2012, when 131 crimes were registered, while the total for the year was 364. In 2011, the city registered 478 homicides, a sharp drop from 2010, with 820.

The drug dealers are working independently of each other, but operate largely under the control of the Sinaloa cartel, said Abel Galván Gallardo, Baja California’s deputy attorney general for organized crime.

“We’re talking about micro-trafficking of drugs,” Galván said in an interview this week. “It is a logical and natural increase that has to do with a battle among these small-time drug dealers.”

Law enforcement authorities are also connecting some of the incidents to the presence of deportees with U.S. criminal records who become linked to the city’s underworld, saying they are especially driving up crime in some sections of the city. Galván said deportees are linked to about 15 percent of homicides.

Galván and others are quick to point out that this year’s homicide figures are a far cry from 2008, when Tijuana’s homicides reached a record of 844, and criminal groups engaged in gruesome displays of their victims, with decapitations and bodies hung from bridges.

“The forms have changed,” said Victor Clark, a human rights activist and longtime observer of organized crime in Tijuana. “This is not the scandalous violence of 2008,” he said. Still, the increase “is of concern, because it speaks to the fragile equilibrium” of criminal groups operating in the region, Clark said.

Tijuana’s homicide numbers, once among the highest in Mexico, are today far lower than in other parts of the country, such as the southern state of Guerrero where drug violence now flares.

“It’s not a huge jump, but we felt it was a jump worth that’s worth addressing fast,” said Jorge Escalante, Tijuana president of the national business group, Coparmex, who has called for greater military presence and closer coordination between the civilian agencies and the military. “Our concern is that this doesn’t escalate to levels we had before,” Escalante said.

Once the domain of federal law enforcement agencies, the investigation of local drug dealing, or narcomenudeo, has been transferred to state governments. But agencies are “left without much training and without the money to implement strategies to combat this,” Escalante said.

With Tijuana, the state’s largest city, registering the majority of homicides in the state, Baja California’s attorney general, Rommel Moreno Manjarrez announced this week that the agency is beefing up its homicide unit in the city, adding 20 agents and a dozen other staff members to focus on the drug-related killings.

While drug dealing is a factor, so is drug addiction, with suspects in domestic crimes typically addicted, Galván said. “Fortunately, we’ve left behind that period of terror of five or six years ago when the big groups were fighting each other,” he said. “Now we’re talking about a public health problem, drug addiction, not just in our state, but across the country.”